Chapter 10
Ingrid turned to see a tall man, in his fifties, tan and lean, with a head of thick salt-and-pepper hair and a layer of fashionable stubble on his sharp jaw.
His suit was a cornflower blue. His white shirt was crisp, unbuttoned to the third button, its sleeves fastened with skull and bones cufflinks.
His face was sun-weathered, wrinkled but glowing with good health.
A pair of cornflower-blue eyes, the same color as the suit, appraised her with a disarming frankness. He looked like a movie star.
“Daddy,” Sailor squealed in a little-girl voice and flung herself at the man. He caught her in one crooked arm and moved his line of sight from her to Ingrid, who found herself suddenly glued to the spot, caught in the tractor beam of his gaze.
“Daddy, this is Ingrid White. Ingrid, my father, Aurelian Stokes Loeffler III.”
“Rill.” The man was extending his hand now, his lips curling into a languid smile. Ingrid felt herself propelled forward, her hand enveloped in the man’s strong, warm grip. “I’ve heard so much about you, Ingrid.”
Ingrid couldn’t stop herself from giving Sailor a questioning look.
“I’ve told everybody about you,” Sailor said. “I’m such a tattletale.”
“She said you got her dead to rights,” Rill Loeffler said. His voice was smooth and deep, tinged with that old Southern-sweet accent people older than her still had. Ingrid felt a little bit hypnotized. “You have a gift. Just like your grandmother did.”
Before Ingrid had time to absorb these words and what they implied—he had known Edie?—Rill had pivoted her to face a tall, thin woman who was so strikingly beautiful she almost didn’t look real. “This is my wife, Scoot.”
The woman was an older version of Sailor.
Blond like her daughter, but with a finer, more chiseled bone structure that put Ingrid in mind of some Nordic queen of a European country.
Her hair was bobbed messily, and she wore almost no makeup.
She wore a blue silk caftan that hit the floor, which was tied with a tasseled gold rope.
She held a glass of brown liquid with an orange peel in it.
Bitter orange and woodsmoke, Ingrid thought.
Scoot Loeffler … such an unlikely name for Southern royalty.
The woman took hold of her wrist and leaned over to air-kiss her cheek.
The pungent tang of alcohol hovered around her, and Ingrid felt the edge of Edie’s enameled dogwood earring jab painfully into the tender skin behind her ear as Scoot pressed her temple against Ingrid’s.
Regal, almond-shaped eyes observed Ingrid. “My dear, I am so honored to meet you. Sailor’s told us all about you, and we’re just so grateful for your generosity of spirit.”
Scoot had the same accent as her husband. The spot behind her ear stung. Ingrid resisted the urge to rub it.
“You must do a reading for me.” Scoot still held onto her wrist tightly.
“I’m absolutely going insane with the wedding planning.
My darling baby has demanded not only the world, but the planets as well, and I could use all the forces of the universe to converge on my behalf. ” She let out a tinkly little laugh.
“Mom—” Sailor said.
“Ever heard of a jade vine?” Scoot went on as if her daughter hadn’t spoken.
“Endangered, grown in the Philippines, pollinated by bats, and only blooms between April and May. I’ve been tasked with finding them in September, for a Georgia bride’s bouquet, imagine that.
Apparently, they’re an exact match for my daughter’s eyes.
” She winked as she finally released Ingrid.
Ingrid swiveled her eyes to Sailor. The girl’s lips were pressed together in annoyance.
“It was just an idea—”
Scoot put up her hand. “It’s what my only daughter wants for her wedding, and I’m going to get it, even if I have to deforest an entire island.
As well as hunt down the harpist you want.
” She turned to Ingrid again. “Her name is Violetta Scarperelli, an Italian prodigy, only fourteen years old. Played at William and Kate’s anniversary soirée in Devonshire. ”
Ingrid nodded, as if Italian harp prodigies and Devonshire soirées were everyday topics to her.
Scoot was still talking. “Listen, this girl right here knows how to play the game. And she knows her father and I are just a couple of patsies. We’re too sentimental for our own good, I will admit this.
” She tipped back her glass, swallowing a deep draught with practiced panache.
Her skin glowed. Her eyes burned unnaturally.
Ingrid felt a creeping mist of darkness oozing from the woman.
Sailor clamped her mouth shut. In her mother’s presence, she suddenly seemed like a very young girl.
“Scoot—” Rill said.
Scoot put out one graceful hand, adorned with an enormous rectangular ruby, in Ingrid’s direction, then withdrew the hand and touched a nail to her lips. “You know, Ingrid, I think I remember your mother, Tess. Left town at a really young age, didn’t she?”
Rill put an arm around Scoot’s shoulders, and Ingrid could’ve sworn she saw the woman subtly shrug it off.
“Yes.” Ingrid drew herself up. “When she was sixteen. She had me down in Florida and brought me back here to live with my grandmother when I was six.”
Scoot let out a hoarse chuckle. “A little rebel child, your mother was. I have one of those myself.”
Another sigh from Rill. Ingrid looked uncertainly at Sailor. She was scowling and not even trying to hide it now.
“And your grandmother, Edith … now her I remember well. A great beauty, let me tell you. A ‘sixties bombshell,’ you know—” Scoot’s lips pursed, as her eyes swept over Ingrid. She looked surprised at Edith and Tess’s progeny. Surprised and a little disappointed.
“I could work on the flowers,” Ingrid blurted out of nowhere, “if you wanted. And the harpist.”
“Work on them?” Scoot knitted her brows.
“Do a spell, I mean.” Ingrid swallowed with difficulty. “Call them in for you.” She glanced nervously at Sailor. Her head was tilted slightly, her eyes gone soft.
“Oh, Ingrid. How sweet,” she said.
Scoot laughed musically, then covered her mouth with her beautifully manicured nails. “Yes, my dear. That really is lovely of you. And so thoughtful.”
Rill took his wife’s arm again, blue eyes flashing with something Ingrid didn’t understand. “You’ll excuse us, won’t you, girls? I have a few cranky guests who need tending to.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Sailor said.
Rill lifted an eyebrow at his daughter. “You owe me. They thought they were going to get the attentions of the guest of honor—” Rill grinned at Ingrid, and she saw, clearly, all at once, how easily he manipulated his daughter.
“Surely I can be off the clock for my engagement party, Dad.”
“Loefflers are never off the clock” came his light reply. “But I’ll take over for an hour. Y’all go have some fun for me, will you?”
His eye skimmed over his daughter and landed again on Ingrid.
He looked at her for one long, unhurried moment.
Thoughtfully, as if he was trying to puzzle something out.
As if there was something he wanted to say.
But then he seemed to think better of it because his eyes moved off her and he steered Scoot into the adjacent room. The low country boil room.
Dazed from the encounter, Ingrid watched him shake hands and slap backs as he somehow, simultaneously, kept his wife tethered to his side.
She would’ve missed it, if she hadn’t been watching so closely: the brief moment when Rill Loeffler glanced over his shoulder and sought out her eyes again.
Finding her looking at him, too, he held them for a second longer than was necessary.
She felt the air leave her lungs and looked away quickly. Sailor was massaging one temple with her thumb. She let out a huff of annoyance, but it was a very quiet one, and she didn’t say a word.
Ingrid suddenly felt extremely hot and dizzyingly uncomfortable.
When Rill had mentioned her grandmother, what had that been that Ingrid had seen in his eyes?
She couldn’t figure it out. Scoot had clearly not been a fan of Edie’s.
Or maybe Ingrid had just imagined that. And what was that look in his eyes just now when he caught her gaze across the room?
If he’d been a guy her age, she wouldn’t have had any question. She would’ve called it interest.
Interest interest.
But Rill Loeffler couldn’t be interested in her. Not in that way. He had to be in his fifties. And he was married. And the ridiculously rich CEO of Savannah Sauce. And the father of her new friend. She was imagining things.
Except …
Ingrid was in the business of reading people.
Had been, since she was a child. She knew she was adept at feeling their emotions, both positive and negative, and if she had to bet on it, she’d just read Rill Loeffler.
She heard that deep, Southern voice say her name, Ingrid …
she’d seen the way he looked at her over his wife’s shoulder.
It was a thing she did when she met someone new.
She connected the person with certain smells.
It helped her crystallize her feelings about them, helped her open herself to what the universe wanted to tell them.
Earlier today, in her altar room, she’d instantly known Sailor was the sharp, fresh tang of salt water and cane sugar.
And now, that Scoot was the smoke of wood fire and the bitterness of an orange zest. But Rill was harder to place.
There was something about him that eluded her. Something sweet but dangerously so.
Sailor stood in front of her, holding up a tiny, delicate chocolate dusted with cocoa powder. “Open.”
Ingrid did and Sailor popped it in her mouth. The flavor burst on her tongue, sweet, earthy with a zing of something else behind it. “Fig,” Ingrid said, surprised. “Infused with …”
“Cognac,” Sailor said.
Ingrid nodded. Yes. That was it. Rill Loeffler was fig and cognac. Two scents, two tastes, that spoke of money and power. Sensuality and refinement—all things she didn’t have any experience with.
All of which felt suddenly, strangely, utterly irresistible.